In recent years, the size of integrated circuits (ICs) has dramatically increased in both area and number of gates, requiring designers to spend time and effort to meet timing closure for the IC design. Moreover, complexity, speed and deep-submicron effects make timing closure of IC designs a more critical task. In order to enable a designer to achieve accurate timing closure, static timing analyzers and other timing optimization tools are utilized.
In IC design, every path that originates from either an input port or a register clock pin, must be properly constrained to obtain correct implementation of the RTL description. Typically, timing constraints are applied mainly to achieve the following: 1) describing the different attributes of clock signals, such as clock frequency, duty cycle, clock skew, and clock latency; 2) specifying input and output delay requirements of ports relative to a clock transition; and, 3) setting up timing exceptions. Different types of timing exceptions are possible, for example, set minimum delay, set maximum delay, set disable arc, set false path, set multi-cycle path, and so on, that are known to those skilled-in-the-art.
False paths and multi-cycle paths are timing exceptions which, if not specified or not handled correctly, will most certainly result in not achieving timing closure. False paths are logic paths which cannot be sensitized because they are functionally blocked, because of delays in re-convergent logic, or because of disabled arcs. As an example, FIG. 1 shows a logic circuit 100 that includes a false path 110 that is a result of re-convergent logic. That is, in order to allow a signal to propagate on path 110, an input 130 should have the value ‘1’ and ‘0’ at the same time. This can be achieved only if there is correct synchronization of the delays of input 130.
Generally there are four types of false paths: 1) clock domain crossing (CDC) false paths; 2) asynchronous false paths that include false paths to scan enable paths and false paths to asynchronous set/reset paths; 3) functional false path that include combinational as well as sequential false paths; and, 4) timing false paths.
Multi-cycle paths are paths that intentionally require more than one clock cycle to propagate data. This information cannot possibly be inferred by the timing analyzer, and therefore multi-cycles paths must be specified by the designer. FIG. 2 shows a circuit 200 that includes flip-flops 210-1 through 210-4, two multiplexers (MUX) 220-1 and 220-2, and a combinational logic 230. An input 250 and an output 255 are a primary input and a primary output respectively. Flip-flops 210-3 and 210-4 constitute a four cycle gray code counter. The state transitions of the gray-code counter is determined by the following sequence:(0, 0)→(0, 1)→(1, 1)→(1, 0)→(0, 0),
MUX 220-1 selects input 250 when the transition of the gray-code counter is (0, 0), i.e., (FF 210-3, FF 210-4)=(0, 0). Then, flip-flop 210-1 is set to the value at input 250 when (FF 210-3, FF 210-4)=(0, 1). On the other hand, MUX 220-2 selects the output of combinational logic 230 when (FF 210-3, FF 210-4)=(1, 0). Flip-flop 210-2 is then set to the input's value when (FF 210-3, FF 210-4)=(0, 0). Three clocks are required to go from state (0, 1) to state (0, 0). Thus, the path from flip-flop 210-1 to flip-flop 210-2 is multi-cycle path that uses three clocks cycle to propagate signals. Consequently, the timing constraint of the paths can be relaxed from a single clock cycle to three clock cycles.
In typical IC designs, time exceptions are generated and then verified. Prior art timing verification techniques can be grouped into three categories: timing simulation, static timing analysis (STA), and functional timing analysis (FTA). The major drawback of these techniques is in their inability to verify sequential false paths, i.e., verification under normal operating conditions. A technique that verifies both combinatorial and sequential false paths is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,902 by Chao et. al (hereinafter the “902 patent”) incorporated herein by reference for the useful understanding of the background of the invention. The '902 patent discloses a method and apparatus for critical and false path verification by taking all the potential false paths and capturing the conditions that make them true paths as a Boolean expression, for the combinational logic only. If the Boolean condition can be satisfied, the simulation is performed on the sequential logic to justify those values. If the satisfiability engine fails to finish, then the simulation is run on the combinational logic, and an attempt is made to justify the values sequentially as well. Specifically, the method of the '902 patent computes a sensitization condition and checks if the condition is true using a Boolean engine. A sensitization condition is computed by taking all the gates of a path and determining what is the propagation condition of the path. In addition a sensitization condition is determined for all sub-paths between through points of a false path. As an example, for the following false path:set_false_path-from A -th B -th C -to Dthe method of the '902 finds all sections between through points A and B, B and C, and all sections from points C to D. For each such section a sensitization condition is computed. As a result, the time required to verify a single path is very long. In modern ICs, where the number of false paths may be large, such an approach is inefficient, time-consuming and error prone.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide an efficient solution for verifying false paths in IC designs. It would be further advantageous if the proposed solution would also verify multi-cycle paths.